Kit Harington thinks the final seasons of Game of Thrones will be “very bleak”

The 2016 Emmys are coming up, and Kit Harington is among the nominees. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with him to talk about his Emmy nom for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama, Jon Snow’s Season 6 journey, and the end of the show.

First of all, let’s hit that nomination, which affected Harington deeply.

"I was more thrilled by it than I thought I would be. There’s something about a group of people turning around and saying, “We liked what you did.” It made me very happy. I wept. And that wasn’t at all what I expected. I expected to be a lot cooler about it."

He wept? Well, now I’ll just feel bad if he doesn’t win. Happily, he’s the odds-on favorite to take home the statue.

Harington also touched on how he approached Jon’s resurrection from the dead in “Home.”

"Having died at the end of the fifth season, I was told I’d come back, but they didn’t tell me anything about how. And I thought, ‘Is it going to be some seismic shift in Jon? Is he going to come back as a nasty person? Is he going to come back as fundamentally changed and altered?’ And he comes back, and he’s the same. And then I thought, ‘Oh.’ Sort of what he comes back with is the knowledge about life that very few people have, which is, there is nothing after it. That’s terrifying for a young man who probably is religious in some ways and thinks he’ll see his father after he dies. He goes to the other side and there is nothing there. That is going to fundamentally change him inside. And it does."

Changed or not, Harington points to the moment in “Battle of the Bastards” when Jon crawls out from underneath a pile of bodies as the moment he turns a corner.

"Strangely enough, without even thinking about it too much, when he breaks free and climbs his way back up, in a way it’s like a rebirth for him. He doesn’t give up. He doesn’t stay down. He fights his way out. It looks a lot like the shot when Daenerys [Emilia Clarke] is being held aloft by the free slaves. That was a happy accident. We didn’t realize how those two would be compared."

Incidentally, that whole buried-alive sequence was also something of a happy accident, as Harington explains.

"That piece came about with me and director Miguel Sapochnik having a conversation. Everything had backed up a bit and we were running out of time to shoot what we had intended. Miguel and I talked about what my greatest fears are. And as it happens, one of my greatest fears is a human crush — those horrible stories you hear about stadiums where people literally suffocate to death because they can’t get out of other people panicking. I thought if we could do that in this sequence, that could be really terrifying for the viewer."

So basically, the best part of “Battle of the Bastards” was improvised on set. In any case, “Battle” earned Harington his Emmy nom. “It was quite physically challenging,” he said. “I was so happy that episode did what we wanted it to, because we spent so much money on it and so much time and effort.”

Moving on, Harington speculated about where the story will go in its final chapters. (Note that he didn’t have any Season 7 scripts when he gave this interview.)

"I think it’s going to get very bleak before if there is a happy ending. If there’s any sort of win or heroic moment for Jon and everyone else. I think it’s going to get very dark before it gets better. I think what we might see this season is those White Walkers and that Army of the Dead really come into force. So that’s going to be exciting to see. I don’t know what it means. I think with the whole “winter is finally here” business, it means everyone is going to have a really bad time."

A bad time for the characters likely means a good time for the audience, so there’s a silver lining there.

Finally, Harington contemplated the end of the show, which is fast approaching. “It has been in my consciousness a lot,” he said.

"This mammoth, goliath event in my life, which has so much of what my 20s are, is going to come to an end. I think I’m going to really make the effort in these next two years to enjoy every moment of it, because I don’t know when I’ll get something like this coming around again."

Neither do we.

The Emmys air on September 18 on ABC. We’ll be rooting for Harington.